Heddin Figures

Three Black women work for NASA but they are rated lower than the computer equipment they are being replaced by.

We follow Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. They are computers for NASA, which means they do computational work. And that they aren't stupid by any means. But being Black and being women, they are way down the pecking order. We follow them through various events as they get involved in getting an astronaut into orbit and not so much challenge the system as just try to get by being themselves, which is hard enough in the system.

We get many, many incidents of them being Black and being degraded. We also get moments of them getting slightly raised and being treated as human beings. And while that is nice, and this is movie speak for how the entire crew of people got treated, I can't help but feel this is just a little on the twee scale and that it couldn't work out as nicely as it does (so far as it can be called 'nice').

Which means I want to read the book to find out more about the true story.

So in that regard, the movie works to raise interest, even if it is very stylised.

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